Thursday, December 20, 2012

The rowboat from Vordingborg as it was found in the old moat. (Photo: Anders Wickström, The Danish Castle Centre)

Researchers have now assigned a date to the
sensational find of a rowboat. The dating cements the small vessel’s
position as Denmark’s only preserved medieval rowboat.

Archaeologists in the Danish town of Vordingborg have every reason to be excited.

During
a recent excavation of the moat surrounding the Vordingborg Castle
ruins, they came across a fallen castle tower and a rowboat from the
Middle Ages. The latter has never previously been found in Denmark.

Lars
Sass Jensen, who headed the excavation, says that a dating of the
boat’s wooden planks reveals that the little vessel was in its prime
around the year 1400.

The end of the Bronze Age
heralds the gradual decline of Eastern Mediterranean trade networks and
the resulting collapse of major Late Bronze Age cities in the Levantine
coast, Anatolia and the Aegean.

A political collapse

The collapse of Hittite power
in Anatolia is believed to be one of the triggers for this transition.
However, the nature of the transition remains controversial.

In Anatolia there are two competing perspectives; the first is that
the transition was largely political with change the result of in-situ
cultural transformations; the second scenario revolves around a power
vacuum left in the wake of the Hittite collapse that was filled by
incoming groups.

The Bronze Age city at Hisarlik – Troy (phases VI, VIIa) – in north-west Turkey, now so closely associated with Homer’s Illiad,
was destroyed by conflict about 3200 years ago and straddles this
period of collapse, fitting into the new geo-political landscape.

The site known as Troy lies in north-west Turkey and has been studied
for decades. Part of these investigations looked at the style of
pottery made before the conflict which was recognisably Trojan but after
the destruction of the city had changed to a style more typical of the
Balkan region.This difference in style typology led archaeologists to believe that
the local people had been forced out and replaced by external
populations from the north.Read the rest of this article...

Scientists Document Highly-Developed Construction Techniques of Wells Built by Early Neolithic Settlers

A research team led by Willy Tegel and Dr. Dietrich Hakelberg from
the Institute of Forest Growth of the University of Freiburg has
succeeded in precisely dating four water wells built by the first
Central European agricultural civilization with the help of
dendrochronology or growth ring dating.

The wells were excavated at settlements in the Greater Leipzig region
and are the oldest known timber constructions in the world. They were
built by the Linear Pottery culture, which existed from roughly 5600 to
4900 BC. The team’s findings, which have been published in the
international scientific journal PLoS ONE, afford new insight into
prehistoric technology. The study was conducted by archaeologists and
dendrochronologists from the Institute of Forest Growth in Freiburg, the
Archaeological Heritage Office of Saxony in Dresden, and the Swiss
Federal Research Institute WSL in Birmensdorf, Switzerland.

The four early Neolithic wells were constructed from oak wood. In
addition to the timber, many other waterlogged organic materials, such
as plant remains, wooden artifacts, bark vessels, and bast fiber cords,
as well as an array of richly decorated ceramic vessels, have survived
for millennia hermetically sealed below groundwater level. With the help
of dendrochronology, the scientists were able to determine the exact
felling years of the trees and thus also the approximate time at which
the wells were constructed.Read the rest of this article...

Three small enamelled
metal Roman pans – the Rudge Cup, Amiens Patera and the Ilam Pan –
thought to be the first souvenirs from Hadrian’s Wall are featured in a
new book edited by Roman expert David Breeze.

The pans are about the size of wine glasses and are decorated with
the names of forts along the western sector of Hadrian’s Wall from
Bowness-on-Solway to Great Chesters. They were made in the decades
following the building of Hadrian’s Wall in AD 122.

Tourist attractions across the Empire

Souvenir items for Roman tourists to buy have also been found at
other famous places across the empire such as Athens, Ephesos and
Alexandria.

David Breeze said: “Remarkably it seems that Hadrian’s Wall was a
tourist attraction soon after it was built. None of the pans were found
on the Wall, but in southern England and France.

A team of dental physical scientists have been using x-ray
diffraction to study the development of children's teeth in order
to track migration patterns of our ancestors.

The team has been using the festively-named XMaS facility (X-ray
Magnetic Scattering) at the European
Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble to perform detailed
analysis of tooth structure and composition. The work will make it
possible to re-interpret archaeological records of ancient human
migrations and may also help scientists to regrow human teeth lost
due to disease or age.

The composition of enamel -- the hard outer-coating on teeth --
is affected by diet. Archaeologists are able to study the ratio of
elements such as strontium and lead present to find markers of the
geology in the soils where the plants the person ate were grown.
These variations can show a change in eating habits brought on by a
migration when the person was a child, when their enamel was still
forming.Read the rest of this article...

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

A pottery-changing event is about to take place (Image: Warner Bros/Everett/Rex Features)

EVEN ancient cities knew about rebranding. Troy was
destroyed by war about 3200 years ago - an event that may have inspired
Homer to write the Iliad, 400 years later. But the famous city rose again, reinventing itself to fit a new political landscape.

Troy lies in north-west Turkey and has
been studied for decades. Pottery made before the war has a distinct
Trojan style but after the war its style is typical of the Balkans. This
led archaeologists to believe that the locals had been forced out and
replaced by populations from overseas.

But when Peter Grave
at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and his
colleagues examined the chemical make-up of the pottery, they realised
that both pre and post-war objects contained clay from exactly the same
local sources, suggesting the same people were making the pots.

"There is substantial evidence for
cultural continuity," says Grave. So if the Trojans never left the city,
why did their pottery style change?

Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and roots of Nazism on agenda at Kassel congress for 200th anniversary of brothers' classic tales

Once upon a time, two German brothers began collecting the best fairytales
of their age. They gathered an array of stories involving princes and
princesses, forests, castles and magic, but also darker sagas of
cannibalism, dismemberment, murder and evil stepmothers.

The 200th
anniversary on Thursday of the first publication of the Grimm brothers'
Die Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), a
collection of 86 stories that became worldwide classics, is triggering a
year of feverish celebrations in Germany to mark the birth of one of the most frequently read books in the world.

Academics
from around the globe, meeting this week in the central German city of
Kassel, close to the brothers' birthplace, are kicking off the 2013
celebrations with a Grimm brothers' congress. Participants, ranging from
lexicographers to psychoanalysts, will focus on everything from the
book's enduring legacy to the brothers' impact on German grammar and how
they shaped the nation's erotic imagination.Read the rest of this article...

Researchers involved in a new study led by Oxford University have found
that between three million and 3.5 million years ago, the diet of our
very early ancestors in central Africa is likely to have consisted
mainly of tropical grasses and sedges. The findings are published in the
early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An international research team extracted information from the fossilised teeth of three Australopithecus bahrelghazali
individuals -- the first early hominins excavated at two sites in Chad.
Professor Julia Lee-Thorp from Oxford University with researchers from
Chad, France and the US analysed the carbon isotope ratios in the teeth
and found the signature of a diet rich in foods derived from C4 plants.

Professor Lee-Thorp, a specialist in isotopic analyses of fossil
tooth enamel, from the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the
History of Art, said: "We found evidence suggesting that early hominins,
in central Africa at least, ate a diet mainly composed of tropical
grasses and sedges.Read the rest of this article...

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

The findings challenge the prevailing view of the Norse as farmers that
would have stubbornly stuck to agriculture until they lost the battle
with Greenland’s environment. These new results shake-up the traditional
view of the Norse as farmers and have given archaeologists reason to
rethink those theories.

“The Norse thought of themselves as farmers that cultivated the land
and kept animals. But the archaeological evidence shows that they kept
fewer and fewer animals, such as goats and sheep. So the farming
identity was actually more a mental self-image, held in place by an
over-class that maintained power through agriculture and land ownership,
than it was a reality for ordinary people that were hardly picky
eaters,” Jette Arneborg, archaeologist and curator at the National
Museum of Denmark, says.

The first Norse settlers brought agriculture and livestock such as
cattle, sheep, goats and pigs from Iceland. While they thought of
themselves as farmers, they were not unfamiliar with hunting.

Blue Boar inn rises again in model and digital form, recreated from detailed drawings found in Leicester family’s archives

The medieval inn in Leicester where King Richard III slept before
riding out to meet his fate at the battle of Bosworth has been recreated
by the team of archaeologists and academics who dug up a local car park
this summer searching for his bones.

News of their discovery of the remains of a man with a twisted spine and a gaping war wound,
in the foundations of a long demolished abbey, created ripples of
excitement around the world. Results of the scientific tests on the
remains have not been announced, though there have been rumours that
they proved inconclusive. Although DNA has been extracted from far older
bones, the success of the technique depends on the quality of their
preservation.Read the rest of this article...

Staffordshire hoard: part of a helmet was among the pieces unearthed in
the Hammerwich field last month. Photograph: Staffordshire county
council/PA

Gold and garnet cross and eagle-shaped mount among latest items unearthed by archaeologists in Hammerwich field

More gold and silver, including a gold and garnet cross, an
eagle-shaped mount, and what could be a helmet cheek piece, have been
churned up by ploughing in Staffordshire in the same field which three
years ago yielded one of the most spectacular Anglo Saxon hauls.

When
archaeologists first scoured farmer Fred Johnson's field in Hammerwich
and discovered the hoard, which comprised more than 3,500 fragments of
metalwork including sword, shield and helmet mounts inlaid with pieces
of garnet and enamel, they left convinced they had emptied it of every
scrap of treasure. Now a 90 further pieces have been found.

The
workmanship in the new finds appears identical to pieces from the
original haul; the helmet cheek piece appears to match one found three
years ago.Read the rest of this article...

The Blue Boar Inn was medieval Leicester’s
‘Grand Hotel’ and is believed to be where King Richard III stayed the
night before the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. With the aid of detailed
drawings, produced shortly before the Blue Boar was demolished, Richard
Buckley has overseen a project to produce a detailed scale model of the
building.

A lost building reborn

The Blue Boar Inn is believed to have been built in the mid-15th
century on medieval Leicester’s High Street — now Highcross Street. It
was a large and elaborately decorated building, which would have housed
wealthy aristocrats and merchants as they travelled through the country.

In the 1830s, the Inn was demolished – and until now, the only
evidence for what it looked like consisted of a pair of engravings made
by Leicestershire artist John Flower in 1826.

Archaeologists are investigating a possible Mesolithic campsite in the
North York Moors National Park. Picture: Jon Prudhoe, West Yorkshire
Archaeology Service

Yorkshire’s oldest campsite could have been unearthed in a national park.

But this was no holiday destination. The site that is
being investigated by archaeologists in North Yorkshire could provide
rare evidence of a nomadic lifestyle dating backing more than 7,000
years.

They are investigating a possible Mesolithic campsite in
the North York Moors National Park. Fieldwork has been carried out at a
number of sites across north east Yorkshire and attention is now focused
on a site at Goldsborough, near Whitby.

In the autumn more than
450 flint fragments were discovered, some of which are tools about
7,000 years old. Many are burnt, indicating the presence of camp fires
or hearths.

Archaeologists say it is very rare to find evidence of
Mesolithic people and this discovery is the culmination of a major
project that has been searching for traces of them in north east
Yorkshire.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Five Saxon graves have been discovered by archaeologists at
St Margaret’s. The graves were unearthed at The Droveway by Keith
Parfitt, of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, who also
discovered Dover’s Bronze Age Boat 20 years ago.

Items found in the graves, including a warrior’s shield, are now
being cleaned so that they can be studied more closely. It is hoped
they might be put on display at Dover Museum.

Mr Parfitt and his team had been called ahead of plans to build
on the site and initial excavations indicated there may well be
graves there.

A few weeks ago, before the builders moved in, the
archaeologists carried out a more thorough excavation and found
five graves. One was believed to have been that of an elderly woman
where a brooch was found and another was of a warrior who was
buried with his shield.

One of the buildings excavated in the Bulgarian Black Sea town of
Sozopol appears to have been a temple to Poseidon, going by the
discovery of a large and relatively well-preserved altar to the Greek
god.

This is according to Bozhidar Dimitrov, director of Bulgaria’s National History Museum.

Archaeologists found the building in front of the medieval fortified wall of the seaside town, Dimitrov said.

He said that the numerous pieces of marble found during excavations
indicate that after the declaration of Christianity as the office
religion of the Roman empire in 330 CE, the emperor’s order to destroy
the temples of other religions was carried out, followed by the building
of houses of worship dedicated to Christian saints, with iconography
with features similar to that of the ancient gods.

Dimitrov said that in Sozopol, there was an example of how a temple
to the Thracian horseman in the centre of the old town was converted
into a church dedicated to Saint George.Read the rest of this article...

Homo antiquus: In 1984, Walter Ferguson of Israel’s Tel Aviv University declared that Australopithecus afarensis wasn’t a real species (PDF). At the time, the known fossils of A. afarensis came from the site of Hadar in Ethiopia and Laetoli in Tanzania.
There was a lot of physical variation among the bones in this combined
collection, but many anthropologists thought the diversity was simply
due to size differences between male and female members of the species.
Ferguson, however, believed the bones actually represented more than one
species. Based on the size and shape of the molars, Ferguson concluded
that some of the larger jaws at Hadar matched those of Australopithecus africanus, a species that had only been found in South Africa. Other jaws in the collection had smaller, narrower Homo-like
teeth, he said. The roughly three-million-year-old fossils were too
ancient to fit with any of the previously described members of the genus
Homo, so Ferguson created a new species name—H. antiquus. Ferguson’s species splitting had a larger implication: If Australopithecus and Homo had
lived side by side for hundreds of thousands of years, it was unlikely
that australopithecines were the direct ancestors of Homo. Ferguson’s work must not have been convincing. Almost 30 years later, A. afarensis is still around and few people have ever heard of H. antiquus.

In mid October an all-points bulletin was emailed to Time Team staff.
It announced that after 20 seasons and over 230 episodes the programme
was being axed by Channel 4. A few days later news of Time Team’s
demise broke in the Guardian. It was a perfunctory end for a television
institution that, over two decades, made British archaeology more
accessible and popular than ever. Here we chart the highs and lows of a
revolutionary format that aimed to bring archaeology to the people.

20 years is a long time in television. In the immediate aftermath of a
programme’s cancellation it is traditional to attempt a post-mortem of
what went wrong. But in this, as in so many other ways, Time Team
bucks the trend. It is practically unheard of for a factual, specialist
programme to spend two decades as the public face of its subject and
become a national institution along the way. While Time Team
unquestionably experienced problems, particularly in its final years,
this much-loved show was an astonishing success, propelling modern
archaeology into the public conscious as never before.Read the rest of this article...

Nearly 20 years of investigation at two rock shelters in southwestern
France reveal the well-organized domestic spaces of Europe's earliest
modern humans

During a car ride through France's Dordogne department, it doesn't
take long to realize that you're no longer in wine country. Signs and
billboards bearing words like "Cro Magnon" and "Prehistorie" and "Grotte" (French for "cave") are stationed along the highways and winding roads. Here, the claim to fame isn't the terroir,
but a preponderance of Paleolithic sites, such as Lascaux, Pech Merle,
and Font-de-Gaume, all of which hold some of Europe's earliest cave
paintings.

New York University archaeologist Randall White has spent the bulk of
the last 18 years here investigating two collapsed rock shelters once
inhabited by some of Europe's first modern humans. Abri Blanchard and
its neighbor to the south, Abri Castanet, sit along a cliff face in the
Castel Merle Valley, just beyond the quiet, 190-person commune of
Sergeac.

The Battle of Largs was the last time a Norwegian military force attacked Scotland

It was the battle which
led to the end of Viking influence over Scotland, when a terrifying
armada from Norway bore down on the Ayrshire town of Largs 750 years
ago.

At the beginning of the 13th century the Firth of Clyde was frontier territory.

The mainland was Scottish but the islands of Bute and Cumbrae just across from Largs were Norse.In fact, the whole of the Hebrides - a region known as Innse Gall - gave its allegiance to the Vikings from western Norway.

The University of Leicester will hold a concert of medieval music which will tell the story of King Richard III’s life.

Members of the archaeological team behind the search for King Richard
III are organising a concert featuring music from the times and places
the King would have known.

The concert will be held on Friday 11 January at the Fraser Noble
Hall in Leicester and will feature a trio of leading Early Music
performers.

It coincides with the annual meeting of the Society for Historical
Archaeology, hosted by the University’s Centre for Historical
Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History.Read the rest of this article...

You may also be interested in this Oxford Experience Summer School course "The Lifeand Times of Richard III"Further information...

Paolo Visonà, of the University of Kentucky, works with an Italian
archaeologist to uncover the base of a Roman funerary altar. (Credit:
Photo courtesy of UK School of Art and Visual Studies)

Over the summer a team of faculty and students from University of
Kentucky discovered evidence of not just one lost community, but two in
northern Italy. Using their archaeological expertise and modern
technology, data was collected indicating the existence of a Roman
settlement and below that, a possible prehistoric site.

Many years ago, archaeologist and art historian Paolo Visonà, a
native of northern Italy and adjunct associate professor of art history
in the UK School of Art and Visual Studies at the UK College of Fine
Arts, first learned of a possible ancient settlement from a farmer in
Valbruna, near the village of Tezze di Arzignano. While working his
family's land, Battista Carlotto had discovered artifacts that looked to
Visonà like ceramics, mosaic, and glass of the Roman Empire.

Curiosity of what lay beneath the farmland was piqued in both
gentlemen. With the approval of Carlotto and with little time to waste
due to growing development in the area, Visonà began to research
historical accounts of the region. Manuscripts found in Vicenza's
Bertoliana Library confirmed Visonà's suspicion; in the late 18th
century witnesses had shared accounts of seeing a Roman city's remains
in the vicinity.

U of A anthropologist
Willoughby believes that the items found prove continuous occupation of
the areas over the last 200,000 years, through what is known as the
"genetic bottleneck" period of the last ice age. Credit: John Ulan/
University of Alberta

U of A anthropologist Willoughby believes that the items found prove continuous occupation of the areas over the last 200,000 years, through what is known as the "genetic bottleneck" period of the last ice age. Credit: John Ulan/ University of Alberta

U of A researcher and anthropology chair Pamela Willoughby's explorations in the Iringa region of southern Tanzania yielded fossils and other evidence that records the beginnings of our own species, Homo sapiens. Her research, recently published in the journal Quaternary International, may be key to answering questions about early human occupation and the migration out of Africa about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago, which led to modern humans colonizing the globe.

From two sites, Mlambalasi and nearby Magubike, she and members of her team, the Iringa Region Archaeological Project, uncovered artifacts that outline continuous human occupation between modern times and at least 200,000 years ago, including during a late Ice Age period when a near extinction-level event, or "genetic bottleneck," likely occurred.

Now, Willoughby and her team are working with people in the region to develop this area for ecotourism, to assist the region economically and create incentives to protect its archeological history.Read the rest of this article...

Tourists will see 'maniacal Roman perfection and incredible hydraulic technology' in labyrinth under Rome's Caracalla baths

The temple to Mithras under the Caracalla baths. Initiates to the cult
would line in a niche and be drenched in the blood of sacrificed bulls.
Photograph: Chris Warde-Jones

In the middle of a patch of grass amid the ruins of the Caracalla baths in Rome, there is a staircase that takes visitors deep into the ground to a world resembling the lair of a James Bond villain.

"This
is our glimpse at maniacal Roman perfection, at incredible hydraulic
technology," said archaeologist Marina Piranomonte, as she descended and
waved at a network of high and wide tunnels, each measuring six metres
(20ft) high and wide, snaking off into the darkness.

The baths, on
a sprawling site slightly off the beaten track in a city crowded by
monumental attractions, hold their own against the nearby Circus
Maximus, its shattered walls standing 37 metres high, recalling its
second century heyday when it pulled in 5,000 bathers a day.Read the rest of this article...

well-preserved archaeological finds have been discovered during this
year’s excavations at what has been identified as the ancient
Plotinopolis, situated in the outskirts of modern-day Didymoteicho,
northeastern Greece. Plotinopolis was a Roman city founded by the Roman
Emperor Traianus, who named it after his wife Plotini.

The hill of Aghia Petra, just outside Didymoteicho, has been the
focus of archaeological interest since before World War II, while in
1965 a golden forged bust of Roman Emperor Septimius Severus was found
there. From 1965 onward, the 19th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical
Antiquities has been conducting systematic excavations in the area.

The mosaics unearthed, form part of the floor of a typical Roman
triclinium, the formal dining room in Roman houses. Monstrous
ichtyocentaurs and Nereids are depicted in the mosaic unearthed, along
with portrayals of the God of Eurus River and Plotini.Read the rest of this article...

Excavation work conducted at the ancient theatre of Nikopolis [Credit: Ethnos]

Part
of the paved floor of the orchestra on which Nero once stood as an…
actor has recently come to light by archaeologists at the Roman theatre
of Nikopolis (Epirus).

Nikopolis
(the city of victory) was founded in 31 BC by Octavian in memory of his
victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. In further celebration of
his victory, he instituted the Actian games, in honor of Apollo Aktios,
to be held every five years.

Emperor
Nero visited Nikopolis in 66 AD. His visit was part of his tour of
Greece. During his stay, he took part in the Actian games, namely in
music and drama competitions. Coins were issued bearing the Emperor’s
portrait as a sign of respect, while the city’s name changed to
“Neronikopolis”.Read the rest of this article...

Not less than thirty two wrecks all over the history of this most major trade port

have been discovered [Credit: Hurriyet]

Excavations
conducted as part of the Marmaray Project, which will connect Europe
and Asia with a railway tube under the Bosporus, continue to shed light
on the history of İstanbul, having facilitated the discovery of around
40,000 historical artifacts since 2004.

Zeynep
Kalkan, director of the İstanbul Archaeological Museum and head of the
excavations, stated that 90 percent of the excavations have been
completed. They have been carried out by 500 workers and 60 experts
since 2004. Around 40,000 historical artifacts which revealed the
8,500-year history of İstanbul have been discovered by the excavation
team.

During
the archeological dig, 36 sunken ships -- 30 of which are merchant
vessels equipped with sails and five of which are galleys propelled by
rowers -- that sank between the fifth and 11th centuries have been
uncovered.Read the rest of this article...

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The cheese thought to have been made was likely to be a soft, cow's milk type

Scientists may be one
step closer to uncovering the origins of cheese-making, as evidence
thousands of years old has been uncovered. What would a Neolithic cheese
have tasted like?

Truly an ancient art, no-one really knows exactly when humans began making cheese.But now milk extracts have been identified on 34 perforated
pottery vessels or "cheese-strainers", which date back 7,500 years that
have been excavated in Poland.

"We analysed some fragments of pottery from the region of Kuyavia
[Poland] pierced with small holes that looked like modern
cheese-strainers," says Melanie Salque, a postgraduate student at the
University of Bristol's Department of Chemistry. Read the rest of this article...

Stanford researchers have discovered that pagan villages plundered by medieval knights during the little-known Baltic Crusades had some problems in common with the modern-day global village.

Among them: deforestation, asymmetric warfare and species extinction.

According to a research paper published in Science, a project investigating the Baltic Crusades' profound environmental legacy could yield valuable insight into colonialism, cultural changes and ecological exploitation – relevant issues not only throughout history, but especially in today's increasingly globalized society.

Remnants of an Iron-Age feast, including cattle skulls and 13 cauldrons, have
been unearthed in Chiseldon, United Kingdom, according to a report in the latest British
Archaeology
The discovery marks the largest grouping of early cauldrons
ever found in Europe. One cauldron features a handle plate in the form of a
cow's head; zoomorphic decoration is otherwise unknown on a British cauldron.
"Analysis of the interiors of the cauldrons has even
revealed traces of animal fats, a tantalizing suggestion that these objects
might have been used in cooking and serving meat-rich stews at Iron-Age feasts
over 2,000 ago," Julia Farley, curator of European Iron Age
collections at the British Museum, told Discovery News.

Farley's colleague Jody Joy, as well as Alexandra Baldwin
and Jamie Hood from the museum, are still studying the artifacts, which were
found buried in a 6.6-feet-wide pit. The cauldrons were made from iron and
copper alloy in the second or first century B.C.
Read the rest of this article...

In the Asterix books, Cacofonix the bard
is forbidden to sing because his voice causes wild boar, villagers,
Normans and Romans alike to flee. But Cacofonix does play the carnyx,
a long, slender trumpet-like instrument decorated with an animal's head
at the top end, and used by the Celts in the last three centuries BC.

The
Greek historian Polybius (206-126BC) was so impressed by the clamour of
the Gallic army and the sound of the carnyx, he observed that, "there
were countless trumpeters and horn blowers and since the whole army was
shouting its war cries at the same time there was such a confused sound
that the noise seemed to come not only from the trumpeters and the
soldiers but also from the countryside which was joining in the echo".

When the remains of seven carnyx were unearthed recently, Christophe Maniquet, an archaeologist at Inrap,
the national institute for preventive archaeological research (Institut
National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives), was curious to find
out exactly what sound it produced when it drove the Romans mad, or was
used to call upon the god Toutatis.Read the rest of this article...

A reindeer bone engraved with two reindeer, part of the ice age art show at the British Museum. Photograph: British Museum

A staggering collection of ice age artefacts from museums across Europe
will showcase the explosion of technical and imaginative skill that
experts say marked the human race's discovery of art

Rail engineer Peccadeau de l'Isle was supervising track construction
outside Toulouse in 1866 when he decided to take time off to indulge his
hobby, archaeology. With a crew of helpers, he began excavating below a
cliff near Montastruc, where he dug up an extraordinary prehistoric sculpture. It is known today as the Swimming Reindeer of Montastruc.

Made
from the 8in tip of a mammoth tusk, the carving, which is at least
13,000 years old, depicts two deer crossing a river. Their chins are
raised and their antlers tipped back exactly as they would be when
swimming. At least four different techniques were used to create this
masterpiece: an axe trimmed the tusk, scrapers shaped its contours; iron
oxide powder was used to polish it; and an engraving tool incised its
eyes and other details.

An Australian anthropologist has used forensic facial reconstruction techniques to show, for the first time, how the mysterious Flores 'hobbit' might have once looked.

Homo floresiensis, as the hobbit is officially known, caused a storm of controversy when it was discovered in Flores, Indonesia in 2003. Some argued the hobbit was an entirely new species, while others suggested it may have simply been a diseased specimen of an existing human species.

Using techniques she has previously applied to help police solve crimes, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong and specialist facial anthropologist, Dr Susan Hayes, moulded muscle and fat around a model of the hobbit's skull to flesh out her face. The results show a suprisingly familiar face, with high cheekbones, long ears and a broad nose.

About Me

I am a freelance archaeologist and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland specializing in the medieval period. I have worked as a field archaeologist for the Department of Environment (Northern Ireland) and the Museum of London. I have been involved in continuing education for many years and have taught for the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education (OUDCE) and the Universities of London, Essex, Ulster, and the London College of the University of Notre Dame, and I was the Archaeological Consultant for Southwark Cathedral. I am the author of and tutor for an OUDCE online course on the Vikings, and the Programme Director and Academic Director for the Oxford Experience Summer School.